Users of Windows who have set the Automatic Updates option to "Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them" were surprised to find that the latest WMF patch had overridden these settings and not only installed the patch, but rebooted the machines as well.

I'm in IT at a large distributor and all of our Windows 2003 servers are set to automatically download patches, but to let *me* install them. this is a 24/7 business. we have machines that HAVE to be running flawlessly at all times of the day. I install available patches at certain times of the day when I know it wont affect users/data.

came in this morning to see our RAS, exchange, file and home folder servers were sitting at login prompts. walked into the warehouse and talked to the night managers who were getting ready to go home. they told me that all of a sudden a meassage appearred on their screens during production asking them if they wanted to reboot now due to a update. thankfully they clicked no, otherwise we would have lost thousands of $$ worth of time/labor in production costs.

I understand your concern and frustration. The enterprise sector is more affected by this issue than home users due to some businesses can be financially affected both with downtime not planned and data loss. Forcing an update to be installed which reboots systems with out the end users permission is not acceptable. Microsoft should be held accountable for not ensuring this wouldn't happen. This is one of the differences between Windows and Linux systems where on Linux systems providing auto-update such as "SUSE Watcher" for SUSE Linux in most cases doesn't require a reboot. This in turn means providing less downtime while ensuring the system is up to date. The exception typically being only when a kernel or graphics driver is updated is when it's preferred to reboot on Linux.